BDC Venture Capital is a major venture capital investor in Canada, active at every stage of the company's development cycle, from seed through expansion, with a focus on technology-based businesses that have high growth potential and that are positioned to become dominant players in their markets. The company helps create and develop strong Canadian businesses through financing, consulting services and securitization, with a focus on small and medium-sized enterprises. BDC Venture Capital has been involved in venture capital since 1975 and has to date invested in more than 400 companies involved in the areas of Life Sciences, Telecommunications, Information Technology and Advanced Technologies.

BDC Venture Capital

Across five funds and two decades, we've helped build numerous successful companies such as Cvent (event management - IPO) , TenMarks (math tutoring - acquired by Amazon) CyOptics (optical chips - acquired by Avago), Neolinear (EDA - acquired by Cadence), and FreeMarkets (B2B marketplace - IPO).  We believe great companies can start anywhere (but to scale quickly they may require a coastal presence), and the best engineers and scientists do not go to just a few schools on each coast.  These core principles lead us to invest in companies from across the country overlooked by many other investors, uncovering hidden gems and helping them scale up.

Birchmere Ventures

FounderFuel is a mentor-driven venture accelerator that helps new startups make progress on the venture path. The company is a four-month intensive program supported by a network of veteran entrepreneurs, operators, and executives. The program pushes companies to refine visions, expand the network and rapidly accelerate output. FounderFuel was founded by Real Ventures in 2011 and is headquartered Montreal, Canada.

FounderFuel

Founded in 2008, Anges Québec is a network of more than 230 angel investors whose mission is to invest capital and time in innovative Québec-based companies from all sectors of activity. The members of the Anges Québec network have, to date, invested more than $ 80 million in the Québec economy, with more than 210 investments in more than 115 innovative companies. Thanks to its professional development center, Anges Québec supports its members in the constant acquisition of new knowledge and skills inherent in the investment.

Anges Quebec

Real Ventures is an early-stage venture firm focused on serving daring entrepreneurs with the ambition to create successful, global companies. Since 2007, Real Ventures has dedicated itself to building the Canadian startup ecosystem on the belief that people, not money, build game-changing companies. Real Ventures provides stage-specific guidance, mentorship, and access to networks and resources to fast-track founders’ personal and company growth. Real Ventures manages $325 million across five funds and its active portfolio of 100+ companies is currently valued at $10 billion. www.realventures.com

Real Ventures

BDC offers financing, consulting services, subordinate financing and venture capital. They focus on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). BDC's services are available across Canada in both official languages through a network of more than 100 offices. Its head office is in Montreal.

Business Development Bank of Canada

Bullpen is a venture capital fund that invests in post-seed capital into early-stage companies. Bullpen Capital launched 10 years ago, the goal was to back overlooked entrepreneurs left behind by the latest Silicon Valley fads. The firm's portfolio spans all categories from fantasy sports to data center equipment to restaurant SaaS. Bullpen was founded in 2010 by Paul Martino and is based in San Francisco, California, United States.

Bullpen Capital

Google is a multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. Their products address a wide range of use cases, including email, navigation, cloud computing, web browsing, video sharing, productivity, operating systems, cloud storage, language translation, photo storage, video calling, smart home, smartphones, wearable technology, music streaming, and more.

Google

Reach supports entrepreneurs that develops technology solutions for challenges across early childhood, K-12, higher education, and workforce reskilling and upskilling. They invest in early-stage tech tools, applications, content, and services to improve educational opportunities for all learners. The Fund also acts as a catalyst, inspiring and enabling traditional and non-traditional investors to provide capital to the fast-growing ed-tech market.

Reach Capital

Red House Education is an early stage social venture capital fund focused on educators and emerging education companies.

Red House Education

Edovate Capital is a seed and early stage venture capital company that invests in the education sector.

Edovate Capital

Salesforce Ventures helps enterprising founders build companies that reinvent the way the world works. Since 2009, they’ve invested in and partnered with more than 400 of the world's tenacious enterprise software companies from seed to IPO, including Airtable, Databricks, DocuSign, Guild Education, Hopin, Monday.com, nCino, Snowflake, Snyk, Stripe, Tanium, and Zoom. Salesforce Ventures leverages decades of expertise in the cloud and long-term relationships with key decision-makers at thousands of businesses around the world to give portfolio companies an unfair advantage, help them build credibility, and accelerate growth.

Salesforce Ventures

Framework Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that helps founding teams and CEOs build world-class companies. It combines a unique data-driven investment decision process with a high-touch collaborative engagement model designed to help world-class entrepreneurs and CEOs in high-growth global market segments scale.

Framework Venture Partners

IVP turns breakout companies into enduring market leaders. With a 40-year record of driving growth and 130+ IPOs, we’ve partnered with over 400 companies including Amplitude, Brex, Coinbase, Crowdstrike, Datadog, Discord, Klarna, Slack, Snap, and Twitter. As trusted allies, IVP helps founders and CEOs meet the challenge of leading a rapidly growing company. Its proven system bolsters functions including those that are sometimes overlooked and partners serve as trusted allies to companies seeking to realize their full potential.

BDC Capital has been recognized locally and nationally as a leader and innovator in business lending and capital investment. Many of New England’s leading financial institutions invest in BDC to help promising companies expand. Over 60 years, we have invested more than $1 billion in thousands of companies in New England.

BDC Capital Corporation

Sapphire is a global software venture capital firm with more than $11 billion in AUM and team members across Austin, London, Menlo Park and San Francisco. For over a decade, Sapphire has partnered with visionary management teams and venture funds to back companies of consequence. Since its founding, Sapphire has invested in more than 170 companies globally resulting in more than 30 Public Listings and 45 acquisitions. The firm’s investment strategies — Sapphire Ventures, Sapphire Partners and Sapphire Sport — are focused on scaling companies and venture funds, elevating them to become category leaders. Sapphire’s Portfolio Growth team of experienced operators delivers a strategic blend of value-add services, tools and resources designed to support portfolio company leaders as they scale.

Sapphire Ventures

SoftBank Vision Fund is a subsidiary of Softbank Group that specializes in growth capital and social impact investments. Sectors that the fund invests in include the internet of things, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, communications infrastructure, telecoms, computational biology, biotech, cloud technologies and software, consumer internet businesses, financial technology, and mobile apps. The Fund is designed to be a catalyst for technology progress in anticipation that it will expand SoftBank's capabilities, accelerating progress towards SoftBank 2.0. It aims to invest in businesses and foundational platforms that SoftBank believes to revolutionize and innovate the world tomorrow.

SoftBank Vision Fund

PAPER

Paper is a developer of an educational platform designed to make personalized tutoring available to all students. The platform connects students with a certified educator who can answer questions and provide contextualized feedback on exactly where the student went wrong in the learning process.

<div><p>Founded by Philip Cutler and Roberto Cipriani, Paper is an educational support system that works with K-12 schools in the US and Canada to provide unlimited, round-the-clock, personalized tutoring support to help schools achieve their strategic goals around student equity, personalized learning, and teacher bandwidth. Paper&rsquo;s tutors are trained in the Socratic approach to academic support and help students with homework, writing, and studying. Paper offers academic support at scale, serving all students equitably and at a fixed cost. Paper offered its on-demand, one-on-one academic support in four languages across more than 200 academic subject areas as of May 2021. As of June 2021, the company had a user base of more than one million students (up from 50,000 in 2020), a tutor base of 1,000, and 100 school districts used its system.</p></div>

Remote learning is driving an education technology revolution.

EdTech: K-12

Paper

<div>
  <p>
    Founded by Philip Cutler and Roberto Cipriani, Paper is an educational support system that works with K-12 schools in the US and Canada to provide unlimited, round-the-clock, personalized tutoring support to help schools achieve their strategic goals around student equity, personalized learning, and teacher bandwidth. Paper&rsquo;s tutors are trained in the Socratic approach to academic support and help students with homework, writing, and studying. Paper offers academic support at scale, serving all students equitably and at a fixed cost. Paper offered its on-demand, one-on-one academic support in four languages across more than 200 academic subject areas as of May 2021. As of June 2021, the company had a user base of more than one million students (up from 50,000 in 2020), a tutor base of 1,000, and 100 school districts used its system.
  </p>
  <p>
    In February 2023, the company 
    <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16706">
      <u>acquired MajorClarity,</u>
    </a>
     a career and college readiness (CCR) tool, to offer a comprehensive CCR solution regardless of the student's preferred path after graduating from high school.
  </p>
  <p>
    <b>Funding and financials</b>
  </p>
  <p>
    Paper raised USD 11 million in its last funding round in December 2020. In June 2021, the company raised CAD 123 million (USD 100 million) in Series C funding to scale its software to support more school districts.
  </p>
</div>


<div>
  <p>
    Founded in 2016, BookNook is an online literacy platform designed for learners in grades 1-5. Partnering with school districts and non-profit organizations, the company focuses on human-to-human learning and works with children one-on-one or in small groups, enabling it to gather rich, observational data. As of June 2021, the company partnered with hundreds of schools, school districts, and non-profits across 35 states.
  </p>
  <p>
    BookNook differs from other digital literacy tools by not requiring students to take formative assessments to check for their understanding. Rather, the platform lets teachers record qualitative data on oral fluency, such as whether a student pauses at punctuation marks as they read aloud, or reads in set phrases. Students can also record self-reflections on the platform.
  </p>
  <p>
    In June 2021, the company partnered with MIND Research Institute, a neuroscience and education social impact organization and creator of the PreK-8 visual instructional program ST Math, to deliver a High Dosage Tutoring program (HDT) for math to K-8 students to address unfinished learning. BookNook tutors will deliver tutoring sessions using the ST Math program over BookNook’s synchronous learning platform. The company launched a new teacher application portal at booknooktutor.com in October 2021, giving experienced teachers the opportunity to apply to become BookNook virtual tutors on its platform. BookNook intends to engage 10,000 virtual teachers to support 80,000 students by the end of the 2021-2022 school year.
  </p>
</div>


BookNook

<div>
  <p>
    Story2 uses its proprietary Moments Method writing system, its StoryBuilder software, and live online group coaching to help high school students and professionals improve their writing, speaking, storytelling, and collaboration skills. 
  </p>
  <p>
    The company aims to help different segments with their specific needs: students with college admission and scholarship essays, professionals preparing for interviews and creating cover letters, and business teams to improve sales, recruiting and company messaging through effective storytelling.
  </p>
  <p>
    Since 2013, Story2 has worked with more than 200,000 individuals in 21 countries with college admission essays, interview preparation, and pitching ideas. The company is expanding into China and India in 2020 and plans to focus on helping science and technology students improve their communication and leadership skills.
  </p>
  <p>
  </p>
</div>


Story2

<div>
  <p>
    Vooks offers a subscription-based, ad-free curated library of children's books converted to video with narration and some slow-paced animation, allowing children to read along while watching. Aimed at young children aged 6 months to 8 years, Vooks promotes reading aloud to develop fluency and comprehension. The company was founded by siblings Marshall Bex and Shannon Bex, and Russell Hirtzel, and is reportedly the first-ever streaming service for books with illustrations, read-along text and animations.
  </p>
  <p>
    In February 2020, Vooks raised USD 12 million in Series A funding; however, the investors and purpose of the funding were not disclosed. In November 2020, the company raised USD 21.9 million in equity investments from more than 30 investors.
  </p>
  <p>
    In November 2020, Vooks partnered with United Way of Metropolitan Dallas (UWMD), a community-based, nonprofit social change organization, and Atmos Energy, a natural gas distributor, to provide around 78,000 one-year Vooks subscriptions for children aged 3 to 6 and early education teachers in the Greater Dallas area. The program is funded by a USD 1 million contribution from Atmos Energy, and contributes to UWMD’s Aspire United 2030 education goal of increasing the number of North Texas students reading at grade level by third grade by 50%. Similarly, in March 2021, the company partnered with Reach Out and Read Of Greater New York (ROR GNY), a nonprofit organization of healthcare providers who promote early literacy. The partnership aims to provide more than 75,000 preschool children with one-year Vooks subscriptions starting in March 2021.
  </p>
  <p>
    In July 2021, it was reported that Vooks is offering its service to authors and producers as a way of quickly testing ideas with audiences through simple animated shorts. Thereby, Vooks expands its library of original content while authors and producers get real-time performance data.
  </p>
</div>


Vooks

<div>
  <p>
    Xeropan offers an AI-powered, game-based approach to learning English through 14 of the most widely-spoken languages. As of October 2020, the app had more than one million players.
  </p>
</div>


Xeropan

<div>
  <p>
    GoGuardian is a provider of student security software solutions to help educators identify learning patterns, protect students from harmful and distracting content, and support students at risk of self-harm and suicide. As of August 2021, the company had partnered with more than 10,000 schools in the US, covering more than 22 million students.  
  </p>
  <p>
    In November 2020, GoGuardian announced a 
    <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/1863">
      merger with Pear Deck
    </a>
     to deepen the support provided to students and teachers and improve their in-class experience. Founded in 2014, Pear Deck is a student engagement platform that allows teachers to create, edit, and launch multimedia content and formative assessments on students' devices to increase student engagement. At the time of the merger, Pear Deck was used by 8 million educators and students in more than 17,000 schools worldwide. Pear Deck co-founder and Chief Educator, Michal Eynon-Lynch, will join the GoGuardian Board of Directors. In May 2022, the company acquired 
    <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/10683">
      <u>TutorMe,</u>
    </a>
     Zovio’s tutoring services business, for USD 55 million in cash to strengthen its product offering. 
  </p>
  <p>
    <b>Funding and financials</b>
  </p>
  <p>
    In August 2021, GoGuardian secured a USD 200 million investment from Tiger Global Management. The funds will be allocated for product innovation, talent acquisition, and business development. 
  </p>
  <p>
  </p>
</div>


GoGuardian

Adaptive learning platforms, personalized learning plans, and AI-powered analytics provide insight into student performance

Learning platforms that promote an inclusive and equitable educational culture for underserved communities

Uses AI/ML to create personalized learning plans, adaptive learning platforms, and intelligent tutoring systems

Platforms providing students with after-school tutoring support on an individual or group basis.

Paper

EdTech: K-12

Key stats

Recent Updates

Paper utilizes OpenAI tech to unveil GenAI-driven review center

Monthly News Summary (February 2023)

Paper raises CAD 123 million in Series C funding

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